1. Field
The present application generally relates to the field of clinical healthcare. More specifically, the present application relates to a system and method which facilitates delivery of patient-care with adherence to standard of care clinical protocols (sometimes referred to as “clinical pathways”; herein, the term “clinical protocols” is used collectively to refer to clinical pathways, clinical flows, clinical protocols, and equivalents thereof as would be understood by those skilled in the art) by physicians, nurses, care-givers or patients themselves.
2. Related Art
Software and its distribution in the healthcare industry involve one or more developers that develop and provide software to entities such as healthcare providers, physicians, nurses, etc. The entities are required to adhere to standard of care clinical protocols while providing patient-care using the software provided by such developers. Such adherence is usually prescribed for mitigating undesired circumstances and ensuring high quality patient outcomes across various patient populations.
The related art methods of ensuring adherence to standard of care clinical protocols involve manual chart entry and monitoring by healthcare professionals. Such methods and systems are typically prone to manual errors. Also, such a related art approach provides weak management and control over actual patient care and implementation of practices, and provides a lengthy feedback loop while involving various entities ranging from patients to various roles of healthcare professionals and software developers. Some available automated tools assist healthcare professionals in reducing manual errors. However, such tools typically focus on aspects of billing, administration and management, acquiring lab results, ordering tests, etc. However, none of these related art tools focus exclusively on timely actions for delivery of patient care at the point of care (e.g., hospital bedside, consultation room, at home, etc.).
Changes in technology have enabled enhanced synchronization between different entities involved in providing healthcare. Certain technology systems that exist today provide healthcare applications over multiple healthcare platforms. However, such related art systems are directed towards providing applications that are limited to post-care clinical decision analytics and billing. Further, such systems only facilitate hindsight adherence to standard of care clinical protocols through systematic review of system users after treatment has been completed, and do not provide real-time adherence to standard of care clinical protocols during treatment. Additionally, existing systems do not recalibrate treatment actions back to standard of care clinical protocols when treatment has diverged from such protocols.
Further, related art systems also do not adapt a simple and easy to use graphical user interface based on measured adherence or divergence from a standard of care clinical protocol so as to encourage adherence and/or drive treatment actions back toward the clinical protocol when divergence is detected.
Accordingly, there is an unmet need for systems or methods that may assist in providing patient-care by ensuring real-time adherence to standard of care clinical protocols, which may typically be evidence-based, established by entities such as, for example, hospitals, physicians and health authorities, as well as the patient, during treatment.